Getting the Word Out - Using Blog Search Engines and Blog Index Sites to Generate Traffic

Blogging has become a prime media for sharing ideas, communicating on the Internet and generating interest or buzz traffic to websites. The latter is what really interests us in an online marketing perspective. By building a blog that provides useful information, you can gain following of readers who visit and subscribe to your articles. From this reader base, you can create permission based contact lists or provide links to products, services and other websites.

However, even if you have the best blog in the world, if no one is able to find your blog you will be writing it for an audience of one (you!).

So, how do you get people to visit your blog and read your articles? You need to make your blog as easy to find as possible! You can easily increase the traffic to your blog by following four steps:

1. You need to make sure your blog articles are Search Engine Optimized (SEO) or at least search engine compliant. This means adding in Keywords into the Meta Tags for your blog and by writing content rich articles that leave the HTML links until the very bottom (known as the Resources section).

2.Submit Your blog articles to other blog sites and article sharing websites. The most popular article submission site is ezinearticles.com. You will need to make sure your articles conform to their rules, but they will share your article with their high-traffic visitors and you can include a link to your blog in the Resource section of the article.

3. Make sure your blog is indexed! This means having your blog “pinged” and “crawled” by sites that index blog websites. This makes your blog articles easier to find for both their subscribers and other search engines that use them to find useful and key-word matching articles.

Here are some recommended Blog Index and Ping sites:

• Blog Digger
• Zimbio
• Ping My Blog
• Ping-o-Matic

4. Register with blog search engines and check your rating on these engines. This will let you try different meta tags and blog postings to try and get your blog articles listed as high in search result ranking as possible. Having a first page ranking is very important.

Here are some recommended Blog Search Engines:

• Zopto
• Blog Runner
• IceRocket
• Blog Digger

Know one ? Contact us !

I recently had the benefit of listening to an excerpt from Jay Conrad Levinson’s Guerrilla Marketing(1) techniques. If you have never read or listened to his materials, you are missing out on some surprisingly simple buy extraordinarily powerful advice. One of the great “guerrilla marketing weapons” is mentioned was treating your website like your window display. This was a great concept, and so I decided to elaborate on it and share my own thoughts.

Your Website is Your Window Display

So, you need to make sure that you have a website that is easy to find by prospective customers (search engine optimization), gives them a reason to step inside (your website content and message) and fills them with the desire to close the deal (fill out your capture form). You also need to give them a reason to “come again!”, and that would be the all important follow up.

There are many great websites on the internet today that struggle to connect with prospects or end up lost and unvisited. If you look closely at these websites, they will be missing one or more of the important window display elements. Websites are not all that different from stores on the street that you walk by on a daily basis. They have the same needs and have to meet the same goals to remain competitive with all the other stores out their. You need to approach your website in the same way you would approach a brick and mortar business.

You need too…

Let people know you have a website and make it easy to find! Stores advertise and have maps. Websites can advertise and they can make sure that their website is Search Engine Optimized so people on the internet have an easier time finding it.

Make your website inviting, fresh and clear. Stores use window displays to capture the attention of passers-by. They highlight their most popular items, inform people of special limited time offers, and give a clear idea of the goods and services that store offers. The front page of your website should do the exact same things.

Stores offer incentives to close the deal, be it a special price on an item, a free gift with purchase or excellent customer service. As an online marketer, you need to give incentives for the prospect to fill out your capture form. The easiest way to do this is to offer a free gift, such as an e-book, or let them now it is a limited time offer. Another way is to have your website’s message connect with the prospect on a personal level to get them to fill out the form for their own benefit. The best websites are able to accomplish both.

Finally, you absolutely must follow up with a person after they fill out your form, and you should do so within 24 hours. Stores do this through curtousy calling, coupons attached to their store receipts and mailing flyers. You can do this easily through building a drip email list that starts by thanking the person for visiting your website and continues to give valuable information to the prospect over time.

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1. For more on Jay Conrad Levinson’s books and audios, please visit his website

The Platinum Synergy Group has recently added new network speed and security enhancement utilities to its Home Office Pro servers.  This will help to speed up the processes that take place in the Home Office Pro members areas while you do various actions, such as searching for or working with your prospects.   This will also help those users who are on a dial-up or satellite internet connection.

We are continuing to find ways in which to increase the speed and features of Home Office Pro.  We want to ensure that Home Office Pro is the best and most powerful CRM system for your business, no matter your internet connection speed.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to email us at support@platinumsynergy.com.

Building a contact list of high quality and high “Return on Investment” leads is a true art form that can take years to master.

Any network marketer can go to an online store and purchase thousands of leads to put into their contact list. They cross their fingers, hoping that the email addresses are valid and that they reply to the opt-in email sent to them. The return on investment (ROI) on these types of leads range from 1% to 15%, and a15% ROI on building a contact list this way is rare. Most new network marketers make and waist valuable marketing dollars on this common mistake.

The true art of quality lead capture requires the prospect to be presented with a form and that the prospect takes action and fills out the form, directly requesting information from you. Right away, that prospect becomes an opted in lead, is no longer considered a “cold call” prospect and has already taken an active interest in your products, service or opportunity.

The true art of lead capture takes place on the capture page and on the form. You must be careful to ask the right questions, not ask too many questions and give a good reason for the prospect the answer the questions honestly. Each of your web pages should have capture page that is easily found and clearly defined. The copy for your web pages need to have a clear and motivational call to action. This call to action will drive the prospects to fill out your capture form. This call to action can take the form of a free gift incentive, such as an ebook download, or an emotional call to action. Emotional calls to action are harder to achieve, and while they may connect with one audience viewing your website you may end up loosing the interest of another viewer. If you are able to creatively create a generic emotional call to action that can appeal to almost anyone and still appear to connect only to the viewer, you will be well ahead of other capture pages out there. This takes time, experience and experimentation.

Remember, the Sixteinth Chaple was not built in a day!

The second ingredient in being a true List Building Master is in the follow-up. Once they have filled out the form, you should have a system in place that can immediately follow up with them through autoresponders and that will notify you of their interest. You need to be able to take action with them as soon as possible, so this automated follow up and immediate notification is very important. With out follow up action, you can and will loose a prospect’s interest. Prospects are constant movers and may fill out five or more inquiry forms a day! You need to make sure they remember you, that they no longer have a reason to fill out other people’s forms and that they feel you will be the answer they are looking for.

Prospects fill out capture forms because they have a need. Once you can define what that need is and give them a solution, you can truly call yourself a Master List Builder!

Customer retention, also known as customer relationship management (CRM) should be a key focus of any business, including network marketing and mlm businesses.  Often, network marketing crm and mlm crm focuses heavily on acquiring new prospected while not focusing enough on customer retention.  Retention focused customer relationship management for an mlm crm or network marketing crm plan will be more successful because more of the residual income resources that are so important to network marketing businesses will be retained.

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